With energy efficiency becoming more and more important to consumers it was only a matter of time before 80 Plus Platinum was made available in low-wattage power supplies for relatively affordable price points. Currently we see 80 Plus Platinum reserved for high end power supply units like Enermax’s Platimax series and Corsair’s AX1200i among others. Yet today we have with us an 80 Plus Platinum rated power supply from Antec in a modest 450W capacity for users who care about energy efficiency and only have a modest system to power. The Antec EarthWatts Platinum 450W power supply we have here today fills exactly that market segment.

The focus of Antec’s EarthWatts Platinum series is really quite simple, they want to offer you 80 Plus Platinum rated power supplies that are more affordable because they come in more realistic wattages for “normal” systems. In fact 450W is more than enough power for any high-end system. You could easily run a single high end GPU and high end CPU platform off this power supply, such as an Core i7 3960X with a moderate OC and an Nvidia GTX 780. Of course the typical user of this power supply is more likely to have an LGA 115X platform and less demanding GPU but the point still remains – 450W is enough for most people making this a very accessible and applicable power supply.